Like you, we are business owners. We understand the challenges and time demands of managing employees, keeping track of all the payroll-related deductions and taxes, not to mention paying and reporting the taxes and benefits — all of which add absolutely nothing to your business. We work hard to try to make your life easier by taking care of these details for you so you can focus on moving your own business forward.

One of the frustrations we face is when we hear about our clients’ problems or needs after-the-fact; if only we had known about the situation before a problem arose, we would have been in a position to have saved the business owner a lot of grief. Questions like, “Do I have workers comp insurance for my employees?”, or “I just hired my first employee – how do I make sure this relationships works well?”, or “I just got a Notice of Determination from the Employment Department because I didn’t have work for my employee for two weeks — is there something I can do about this?”, or “My employee just quit — what do I need to do now?”, or “Can I just pay my seasonal employee as a 1099?”, or “I told my employee not to work overtime and yet s/he worked more than 40 hours last week. Do I need to pay the overtime?”…… We could go on and on.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we small business owners could share our experiences, advice and help each other out? Being small business owners ourselves, and working with hundreds of small businesses in the Portland-metro area, we thought we would start this blog to do just that and hopefully save you from learning from the business school of hard-knocks — all in occasional bite-sized doses.